How Ken Clark Built One of the Fastest Growing Private Practices in America | GP 42

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How Ken Clark Built One of the Fastest Growing Private Practices in America | GP 42

Want some tips from a professional on how to properly organize your practice for efficiency? How can you create a private practice that grows autonomously? What do you need to do in order to fully assume the role of CEO?

In this podcast episode, Alison Pidgeon speaks with Ken Clark about how he built one of the fastest-growing private practices.

Meet Ken Clark

Ken is the Founder and CEO of Chenal Family Therapy PLC, a collaborative private practice with 15 offices across the state of Arkansas. CFT’s 100+ person staff (which includes both master’s level therapists and psychiatrists) serves over 1,250 clients per week across 15 offices.

​As a clinician, Ken has logged nearly 20,000 hours in the therapy chair. As an entrepreneur, he’s built a company that Inc Magazine named as one of the Fastest Growing Companies in the United States three years in a row.

Visit Ken’s website. Connect on Facebook and Instagram.

In This Podcast

Summary

  • Looking for blind spots
  • Internal structures of Ken’s practice

Looking for blind spots 

Ken actively seeks out what he does not know yet. He works closely and often with consultants, he seeks out client feedback and works in peer advisory groups. This helps him get past any narcissistic leadership and learn what he needs to learn about how to do things well.

There is no way one person can know everything by themselves – seeking out skills from others with humility and grace is a rocket to success and building a strong multifaceted business.

Internal structures of Ken’s practice

Ken thinks that the industry is oversaturated with middle management. Most of his clinicians also have leadership roles and are clinical directors. He mostly hires autonomous people so that there is trust fostered amongst staff to get done what they need to, and that they do not need to be micromanaged.

There is a senior leadership team whose job is to keep doing analysis on the organization while keeping the future in mind. There is an operational manager with two assistants that oversee all the admin not related to therapy and handle all the other admin.

Ken also has an executive assistant that acts as his main assistant. Having this assistance allows him the mental space and energy to focus on being the CEO behind the practice while trusting those below him to figure out the internet connection while he organizes business deals.

All that frees me up to be the guy that pushes things across the finish line. It is amazing now that I’m freed up from stuff. (Ken Clark)

Get 50% off by using the code ‘summit2020’ on the Groundwork for Growth – Scaling Your Practice Self-Study Course

Email Ken directly at [email protected] for a link to do a free assessment on the Predictive Index.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Useful Links:

Meet Alison Pidgeon

A portrait of Alison Pidgeon is shown. She discusses ways to grow your group practice on this week's episode of Practice of the Practice. Alison is a serial entrepreneur with four businesses, one of which is a 15 clinician group practice. She’s also a mom to three boys, wife, coffee drinker, and loves to travel. She started her practice in 2015 and, four years later, has two locations. With a specialization in women’s issues, the practices have made a positive impact on the community by offering different types of specialties not being offered anywhere else in the area.

Alison has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016. She has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses, through mastermind groups and individual consulting.

Thanks For Listening!

Feel free to leave a comment below or share this podcast on social media by clicking on one of the social media links below! Alternatively, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe!

Podcast Transcription

[ALISON]:
You’re listening to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Whether you’re thinking of starting a group practice, are in the beginning stages of a group practice, or want to learn how to scale up your already existing group practice, we have lots of great content for you.

Grow a Group Practice is part of the Practice of the Practice Podcast Network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you grow your group practice. To hear other podcasts like the Imperfect Thriving podcast, Bomb Mom podcast, Beta Male Revolution, or Empowered and Unapologetic, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Hi, and welcome to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. I’m Alison Pidgeon, your host. So I’m very excited to share this interview with you today. I’m interviewing Ken Clark. He is the founder and CEO of Chenal Family Therapy, which is a collaborative private practice with 15 offices across the state of Arkansas. He has over 100 employees, and they serve over 1250 clients per week across 15 offices. So, Ken is a really interesting guy. We talk about, in the interview, how he started out his career working in financial advisement and went back to school and became a therapist. And so he brings a lot of his business background to the practice, obviously, in addition to being a clinician. He has won the title of being one of the fastest growing companies in the United States by Inc Magazine, three years in a row. Super impressive, the practice that he’s built over the past 10 years.

We talk a lot about, you know, what is it really like to build a practice that large? When do you hit certain thresholds where you realize you have to do things differently? He talks about when the practice got quite large, and he was very vulnerable, was sharing his sort of breakdown, was realizing what he had built and all the pressure, and having to be responsible for that much money and that many employees, and a point at which that got really difficult for him. So, I really appreciate talking to Ken. I think it was such a great interview, and without further ado, here’s my interview with Ken Clark.

________________________________________

[ALISON]:
Ken Clark, welcome to the podcast.

[KEN]:
Thank you for having me. I’m honored to be on it.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you about your group practice. So maybe a good starting point would be to talk about the group practice you have now. What does it look like? Tell us all the details.

[KEN]:
Well, first, I’m honored. Like any group practice owner, it’s my baby. So, any chance you get to, like, pull out the wallet full of pictures about your group practice, you love doing it. So yeah, we have a group practice. We are based in Little Rock, Arkansas. But we actually have 18 offices across the state, and are about to open our first office in North Dallas. And I think over the next 10 years or so our aspirations are to be kind of all across the MidSouth. It started as just me, I say that… incredibly supportive wife, who was the original scheduler and is now an amazing marriage therapist herself, but started just us. We moved from California out here to take life a little slower. Part of why we picked Little Rock, Arkansas was I looked around the country and looked for where the most divorces were, and the least number of therapists. So where the highest ratio of divorces to therapists was, that reflects my background. I’m a former Wall Street guy and kind of a numbers nerd and all that.

So we moved to Arkansas, to Little Rock, and we were going to take it slow. My goal was to see 20 clients a week and maybe make $70,000 or $80,000, which sounded like so much money coming out of nonprofit work where I’d been working right before this. And so we launched a practice and real quickly was overwhelmed with a need, and then took on an intern who ended up being with us for eight years and kind of my number two for a long time. And it just kept growing from there. Not because we were running ads for therapists or anything like that – in fact, we’ve never run an ad for a therapist in our existence – but we just kept running into like minded people who cared for slightly different populations than the rest of us in the group cared for and so we just, kinda like this refugee camp, just kind of kept glomming on, like really cool therapists who were really sick of working at really crappy places.

And so now we’re about 125, 135 employees, somewhere in that range. We just this last week, broke 1600 appointments for the week for the first time. So we’re on track to do about 75,000 sessions in the next 12 months. And we do everything from couples, to kids, to testing, to med management, to we got a dietitian, we kind of do it all.

[ALISON]:
Congratulations.

[KEN]:
Yeah, it’s fun. And all the congratulations is to all these other people who make it work. Like, I’m one of 130 people. So it’s really a team high five. But thank you.

[ALISON]:
So, what year did you start the group?

[KEN]:
We started in 2010. I had been doing my internship in California before that. So we’re right at 10 years in.

[ALISON]:
Okay. And so then… I wanted to go back to what you were saying about you, you know, obviously had a different career before you went back and became a therapist. So, like, how does that work in your mind? Because usually people don’t go from like, a very sort of, financial background to becoming a therapist. It’s like, very divergent things, right?

[KEN]:
Totally. Well, um, so I was on the wealth management side of things. So I was working with families, and money, and inheritance, and turns out that super emotional stuff, like, people are more willing to talk about their sex lives a lot of time than they are about their bank accounts. And so a lot of drama around that, and I actually worked in a family business there with my own father. So there was a lot of drama around that, like, best friend, but really hard working together kind of thing. And so I think there was some, even when I was a Wall Street guy, some awareness that they’re like, wow, relationships are, they really, you know, can undermine the successes of even the most successful families. And so, kind of piqued my interest. It has benefited what I do, because there are, I mean, I’m trained to look at economic trends, I’m trained to be a naysayer when it comes to fads and, you know, dot coms and all that stuff that was big when I was doing that, like, we were taught to be critical thinkers around that. So I think that’s given me a little bit of an edge in our industry, of really kind of just looking where there’s need and not getting swept up in emotions, things like that.

The other is somewhere along the way, I wrote an insurance textbook. So if you become a life insurance and health insurance agent in the United States there’s a chance you might read my textbook, one of many. But that, I have a deep understanding of the insurance industry, and how insurance actually works and all that. That’s also made us a partner with insurance companies, instead of seeing that insurance companies were the adversary. So we have a very pro insurance practice, we try and be somebody who insurance companies are thankful for and all that, and work very closely and try and work proactively with insurance companies to embrace new programs and initiatives and all that.

So it’s made it a little different. I’m still a numbers guy, and a business guy raised in a non emotional family, or maybe not an emotionally healthy family. So somewhere along the way I still, as a leader, have had to learn the leadership side of this, the Brene Brown side of this. I can do the numbers just fine. But, you know, there’s people behind all those numbers. So there’s a lot of advantages that I brought into it. But I also feel like I’m playing catch up some days with some of my more emotionally intelligent, amazing team members.

[ALISON]:
Ah, yeah, that’s interesting. So that was actually what I was going to ask you next, was just kind of what your business background helped you to do in terms of starting the practice because obviously, lots of us go to school right out the gate to become therapists and we don’t get any business training. So obviously that puts you at an advantage maybe in other ways a disadvantage, but anything else that you didn’t mention that you think helped you?

[KEN]:
Yeah, I think early on it… So I was a wealth manager, right? I was a stockbroker and there’s 12,000 stocks that trade in the US market or something like that, give or take 1000. And early on, I figured out there’s no way that that one stock broker has the time to go out and figure out which of those stocks are best, and that’s what mutual funds do, right? These people with staffs of 100 people just sit around and nerd out on one little corner of one little industry. And so, that very early on shaped my belief that not only do I not need to know everything, and I’m liberated from that, but there’s no way I can know anything. In fact, there’s people that know it so much better than me because that’s all they do all day long.

So I think one of the hallmarks of our practice, the one thing I would brag that I’m better at, maybe than anybody else that I’ve met in this business, is I am obsessed with blind spots, obsessed with what I don’t know. As Jim Collins, the author puts it, I’m productively paranoid. So I’m a big believer in consultants, I’m a big believer in employee feedback. I’m like, you know, like, we’re just obsessed with a feedback and consultation culture in our practice. I would say, Ground Zero, my success is peer advisory groups. For the last five or six years, I’ve been in a group called Vistage, there’s other groups like that. But it’s where a bunch of business people sit in a room for eight hours, once a month, and pick apart each other’s businesses and give each other advice and hold each other accountable and call each other out. And that has been amazing as far as me getting outside my own narcissistic leadership and figuring out what really needs to happen for the good of the company. So I highly, highly recommend that entrepreneurs and business people drop the notion that they need to be masters of all these different domains and instead become very efficient users of wise people. So that’s probably the biggest thing I learned out of all that, is how little I actually know.

[ALISON]:
Right, right. And I think that’s so important because I think there’s so many business owners who think like, oh, I should just be wearing all the hats, but there’s no way you can be good at everything.

[KEN]:
No, no.

[ALISON]:
Yeah. I’m curious about obviously, you have a very large practice, over 100 employees – was there at a point at which you realized, okay, we have, you know, X number of employees, now. I need to start doing things differently, or this organizational structure needs to look different. Or like, was there sort of a tipping point with that?

[KEN]:
Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a great book called Scaling Up, which is just in general about taking businesses to a larger level. And the stats that they look at in the book mirror a lot of my own experience, which is, things become not very manageable above 10 or 12 people for one person, again, around 20 people, again, around 40 people, you know. There’s these plateaus where just based on the size of teams and how organizations work, it becomes very hard to maintain. And so probably that, right around 12 people in our practice, we need to start hiring, or I need to start paying some people to step up and absorb some duties. That kind of crescendoed again at 20, and again at 40.

And somewhere around 80 or 90 employees, which is about two and a half years ago, I literally had probably three to six months where my wife had to pick me up off the floor, dry heaving because I was so overwhelmed with what we’d gotten ourselves into. I had a day – I mean, we have $40,000 a month in leases, right? So there’s a day where I woke up and I’m like, I don’t freaking want to pay rent this month, and I don’t have a choice, and I’ve got half a million dollars of leases extending out a year, extending out five or six years. Holy crap, what have I got myself into? And I’d never had a panic attack in the business. But for about three to six months, I mean, I lost 20 pounds, I was like, working through my humiliation of like, what if I just file bankruptcy and close us down? So at all those points, I realized I needed help.

That last iteration was really some deep soul searching about needing implementers. I’m a great visionary. I’m a crappy implementer. I’m great about kicking down doors, but I’m really bad at walking through them. So I really made a shift about two, two and a half years ago into team leadership and senior staff who advise me, people who just go off and do things in my company and tell me what’s been done, which is so not what an entrepreneur wants to do, is let other people just make decisions about who’s getting hired and fired. So it’s wonderful. There’s days where I log into, you know, our record system, and I look at the therapists, I’m like, I have no idea who that therapist actually is, like, I’ve never, that’s the first… So I’ll call somebody, hey, did we hire a therapist? Yeah, we hired a therapist. All right. So um, that was terrifying to let go of all that but with the right people in place, it’s been liberating and made our growth even more exponential. So for me those limitations, the workaholic that has no more to give is where I’ve tended to seek help.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, so like, was there something in particular going on around that time when you had that sort of breakdown moment of like, oh my gosh, this business has gotten so big, and maybe it sort of felt like you didn’t totally have control over it? Maybe that was part of the panic at the time. Was there anything else going on at the time that made you feel that way? Or it was just sort of like the, it sort of hit you like a ton of bricks, how big it had gotten?

[KEN]:
No, you know, it really comes down to cash flow, right? Probably all us, as owners and practice owners, you look at your bank account in the morning or whatever, and make sure the credit cards ran the night before. And, you know, when you’re a small practice, sometimes you have to juggle and you’re off by $1,000, or something like that. And we had a credit line that we had never ever used. And I woke up one morning, and I had accidentally scheduled a tax withholding payment too early. So I woke up and I looked at one of my bank accounts, and it was overdrawn by $40,000. And it was money that was supposed to go out, like, two weeks from now, and the revenue theoretically would have come in to fix it, all that, but I was like, holy cow, like, when you’re wrong at this level, you’re really wrong. And by the way, when you’re overdrawn by 40,000, the bank starts calling at 6:30 in the morning, right? Like, I had it like [unclear] message. Thankfully, we had this credit line, I was like, well, I, you know, but now I owe $40,000. So it was just these huge amounts of money starting to move back and forth, became utterly terrifying at some point. Our payroll is $400,000 a month right now. You know, my tax deposits are $50,000 or $60,000, every two weeks, like, it still turns my stomach when I hit ‘Submit’ on my tax, like, that is so much. It’s a house in some parts of the country. So that was the big piece that kind of just really rattled me was, wow, these are really big numbers. These are really big numbers. These are like, my kids don’t go to college numbers if I’m wrong.

[ALISON]:
Right. So it feels like a lot of pressure at that level.

[KEN]:
Yeah, yeah.

[ALISON]:
Yeah. What is…? I’m curious about what is your organizational structure look like now? Because, um, you know, obviously, like you said, you sort of hit those plateaus, where you realize you kind of need to start structuring things differently, or you need to start delegating things that you were doing or hire people. So like, what’s your role in the business? Like, what does sort of upper management look like in terms of, you know, where people are? Are they actually, you know, do you have a manager like in each office? Or how does that look?

[KEN]:
So one of my beefs with the industry is our industry is too thick on middle management. Most clinicians are trained for independent practice, and especially some of these agencies and things like that, you have… So here’s my really cynical view: about a third of the people that get into our field are naturally gifted at it, about a third of the people are good at and have to work at it, and about a third of the people got into this field because somebody told them they’re good at giving advice, and they have no business in this field. And those people have one or two choices – get a new career or get into management. And that’s what I see happen a lot, is a lot of lousy clinicians get into management because they hate working with people. Well, that seems super contradictory to me that the person leading Rockstar clinicians is somebody who hated being a clinician, whose own issues may lead them to poopoo somebody else’s success, or whatever.

So in our organization, every clinical director – we have clinical directors at most of our locations – they’re all practicing clinicians first, foremost, and always. The majority of their income still comes from their clinical work. Frankly, we probably underpay them for the leadership role. But they’re the kind of people that can’t help but get into leadership. They’re the kind of people before I even had them in the clinical director role, they were already spending time helping shape what was happening in those clinics. So clinical directors are there, all our clinics run very autonomously. We’ve always hired and enjoyed autonomous people. That’s kind of our semi private practice model. We kind of leave you alone to do your thing within certain boundaries. There’s a clinical director mentor, who is just an absolute Rockstar, she actually runs our second biggest clinic. She was employee number six, moved away, came back, she was employee number 50 or something then, and she just gets it. She’s a culture nerd. She’s a great clinician. She loves building things. So, she doesn’t oversee, she mentors all the clinical directors who still answer directly to me if push comes to shove.

There’s also a senior leadership team that we call Groot, like that little character from Guardians of the Galaxy or whatever, stands for growth, retention, obstacles, opportunities and threats. And it is a group of senior leadership, whose whole job is just to keep doing SWOT analyses on the organization, you know, and looking down the road. So that’s, that’s comprised of myself, a couple of our prescribers, a therapist, so those are just kind of clinicians at large that are voices for the clinical experience, Gail, who’s my CD mentor, and then we have an operations manager, who oversees all the non clinical, and then her two direct reports. So we have a director of scheduling and a director of billing. And then my personal assistant who is really more of a handler, who literally shows up to those meetings and takes notes on what I committed to, and then afterwards is like, hey, by the way, you need to send an email to this person. So that team meets every week for two hours, virtually. And I retain the last word if I need it. But a lot of what I do is sit back and let that committee run. And there’s even somebody who’s on that committee who runs those meetings besides me. Otherwise, it’s me talking the whole time. So I try and shut up and let the other team figure out problems.

And in all that, by the way, the thing I wish I would have done way sooner is hire an executive assistant, holy cow. If you are stretched too thin and overwhelmed, then you need to hire an executive assistant. All that frees me up to be the guy who now pushes things across the finish line. It is amazing now that I’m freed up from stuff, my ability to reach out to a local hospital system and have conversations with their CEO about what it would look like to embed with their hospital and offer services under their roof at no cost to them. Like, I get to have these high level conversations now instead of figuring out why the internet’s not working in one of our offices. So, that’s really my role and what I’ve been freed up to do is kind of be chief strategist and chief executer of those strategies, but I really have a lot of help underneath me doing that.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s great. Because I think so many people get stuck in the role of trying to figure out why the internet doesn’t work and they never take the time to do the CEO role.

[KEN]:
It’s a hard transition, because early on you do it all. And that’s how you cut costs and all that stuff. I mean, you empty the trash, and you hire and fire, and you pick out the couches, you know, and that’s tough to transition away from anyway, it’s tough for other people to step up and do when they know you do it, and have opinions about it. So it’s, like, I’ve had to make myself scarce so that other people can lead.

[ALISON]:
Right, right. Yeah, it’s so important. So how has the pandemic changed the practice?

[KEN]:
Um, you know, there’s a scene from Apollo 11, or whatever that Tom Hanks movie was that I loved. It set out the scene right at the beginning of it. It’s the scene where they’re in Mission Control and, you know, things are looking really bad for the astronauts in that capsule, and a couple of the guys in Mission Control are saying, they’re toast, like, and it was actually one of the bosses, he’s like, they’re dead, man, this isn’t gonna work out. And Ed Harris turns to him and says, like, it makes me tear up, such a great moment, he turns to him and says, I think this is gonna be our proudest moment, right? Like, this is this moment here where we get to show who we are. And so I think there’s been a lot of that for us as a practice. Our whole admin team was already virtual, like, 25 full time admin people, they all work from home. That’s something we value, is that they get to get their kids off the school bus kind of thing. So that was super easy. So where a lot of places just shut down but the mental health need didn’t go away, we had a lot of opportunity there where the phone just rang off the hook.

We saw a lot of reactivation of old clients. But really, it was an opportunity for us as a practice and for me as leadership to make some statements about what we value and how we invest in our staff. Right out of the gate, we got everybody’s Zoom accounts ponied up instead of some of these other platforms that just bogged down and we paid for the right stuff. You know, everybody got masks and mask allowances, like, nice designer masks, you know, we got everybody those brass key poles that you use to open the door, like, we just went all in on caring for our staff. The culture was the hardest piece. We had to figure out ways to stay connected and so we did everything from Friday night family trivia hosted by me on Zoom where it was like Disney trivia, and everybody text Ken the answers, and, you know, 100 people are texting me hilarious answers to, you know, ‘what was Gaston’s horses name’ or something.

So we did a lot of stuff like that. We empowered staff to lead stuff as well. We had one staff person lead a study on Heuga, which is the Danish principle of, you know, creating this super happy space in your home. She lived over there, or maybe it was married somebody who lived over there. She did an eight week study, we paid for all the books. So we just always have been finding these ways to do it. A lot of state of the practice updates for me, here’s what’s going on, here’s what’s going on with telemed, here’s what I’m afraid of, here’s how I’m doing, like, making myself accessible from up front instead of just being the brain guy.

So all that to say that was the story up through now, and I think [unclear] now and now we’re navigating just the exhaustion with it, the reality that we still got six months plus, you know, in the middle of a chaotic world. So we’re now shifting to a lot more individual, one on one care of our staff. I think myself and other senior leaders are just playing therapists to the people that we care about. Numerically, we took about a 40-50% hit that first week in March, when the world ground to a halt. We recovered to about 90% of our normal caseload within a month or two, and now we’re at record levels, which is not uncommon. I’m hearing of other practices doing record numbers as well, but we’re now in that mode where we got to find more therapists because we’ve got just too many clients coming in. So it’s been wild, it’s been one of the big tests of all of our leadership. This is not what I ever thought I was getting myself into as a practice owner, as an entrepreneur.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, yeah. And I’m glad you brought up that point about, you know, trying to figure out ways to support people and still kind of have those connections, even though it has to be over zoom or whatever. Because that’s one thing that I realized when, you know, all my staff is still working from home and has been since March, and it’s easy to start to feel isolated because you’re not seeing your co-workers in the hallway and that type of thing. And, you know, as the leader, then you have to sort of think about how are we still going to demonstrate our culture and have that sense of connection, even though we’re not all together anymore?

[KEN]:
Gail, my clinical director mentor, who’s just a rockstar, we did a clinical director retreat – we had a physical one scheduled. Of course, we weren’t going to be super spreaders in the middle of this, so we did it all by Zoom, it was over two days, she put together boxes with like, individually wrapped presents, like, do not open until 9am on Thursday morning, do not open till noon, that ranged everything from, like, gourmet [unclear] pods to like little bottles of fireball or whatever for when you’re done. And, like, brought in an experiential art project person, like, included craft supplies in every box, for all the clinical directors. And we had another therapist from outside our practice do experiential art, we have a yoga trained clinical director who leads yoga for everybody, I mean, just awesome. In some ways, again, more of an opportunity to show that people are special than before the pandemic, right? Because it would just be so easy to give everybody a pass right now. If Gail couldn’t do anything besides pull off a one hour meeting with no PowerPoint, we would have all thought she was doing more than she should be doing because it’s the pandemic. And so for her to go to that level, and by proxy our practice, you know your value.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, because I know you do business consulting for people in private practice. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about that. What do you do and the types of clients that you work with?

[KEN]:
So there’s a couple things I do. One, we do practice coaching through semiprivatepractice.com. That’s kind of a knockoff of our own model, which is when you work here, you really work for yourself. We’re high autonomy and high support. So it’s kind of like this splitting the difference between being in your own private practice and being somewhere else. But we got a lot of great materials on there. I’ve got a 12 week course on there called Groundwork for Growth, if you’re looking to scale a practice, which is very different than growing a practice. If you go, use the code summit2020 and get that half off. We do all kinds of coaching on there. And so if you want individual or packaged coaching, we can do that. My director of billing, director of scheduling and cultural guru all do coaching as well. So if you need any of that.

I also do a lot of work with companies of any kind, not just in our industry. I mentioned before the call, we fell in love with a platform called the Predictive Index, which has changed the way that we hire, inspire, diagnose problems, retain people, promote people, all that kind of stuff, and then build our leadership teams. So we do consulting with basically any company that wants to help management do a better job of understanding their own culture and hiring the right people and lowering turnover. So that’s super fun. So yeah, we do all that. And then I always call myself the C suite marriage therapist. So if you’re CEO, CFO, C-something, and your marriage is in deep doo doo, we’d love for you to get on a plane and come to Arkansas, we’ll put you up in a five star hotel and smack you around a little bit. So I get it, right? The big running joke in my family is that I’m married to the business and having an affair with my wife. So for workaholics, business owners, men or women, couples, we always love to do that as well.

[ALISON]:
Wow, that sounds like [unclear] niche.

[KEN]:
Yeah, it’s fun. And I’ll tell you, it’s like when [unclear] a therapist, you know, and you find yourself in the room with somebody, giving advice and on the inside, you’re thinking, oh, my gosh, my wife would kill me if she heard me giving this advice because I was arguing the other direction just this weekend, you know. So it’s fun working with C suite people and other practice owners. It’s maybe the least alone I feel, is when I sit down with the practice owner with 20 employees and a culture problem because I’ve been there, I get it. That person probably gets me more than just about anybody else in the world. And it’s fun to get to help them. So same with the C suite folks. Like, I get kids who feel like your favorite kid is the business, you know, like, I raise those kids.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, can you give us the URLs for [unclear] and all that information?

[KEN]:
Yeah. Sure. You can find practice coaching stuff at semiprivatepractice.com. You can also find it on Facebook or Insta, you know, just /semiprivatepractice.com. We also have a group only for practice owners, whether you’re a solopreneur, or a group practice owner. You can also, if you would like to see this predictive index, we let everybody kind of take it as a free gift. It costs us close to $20,000 a year for a practice our size, but we’re allowed to give out a few free to other people as a test drive. So if you email me at [email protected], I’ll send you the link, you can take it, it’ll send you your results. Really, really cool. It’s been used for about 60 years, 20 million applications, 300 empirical based studies. So if you’re looking to do something different as far as culture, or engagement, or how you hire, or not hiring people you regret, it’s a cool platform. So you get a freebie, email me, I’ll send you the link.

[ALISON]:
[Unclear] speak with us today. I know just from hearing what you’re doing in your practice, it sounds amazing. And sounds like folks have a lot to learn from you. So, thank you so much.

[KEN]:
Creativity is just forgetting where you stole it from. So everybody, go read Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead – best business book out there, I think. Also another resource I recommend, Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss. Great, great kind of just business, looking inside other business owners’ minds. So, thank you for having me. It was an honor to be here.

[ALISON]:
Thank you.

________________________________________

[ALISON]:
Thanks so much for listening today. I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. I was just super impressed with everything that Ken has done with his practice. And yeah, it’s amazing to hear his story. So, I will see you next time.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.